The Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) of a computer is the backbone of the operation of that computer. The BIOS is programming that controls the basic hardware operations of the computer, including interaction with floppy disk drives, hard disk drives and the keyboard. Because of the ever changing computer technologies, even though a computer may still be acceptable to a user, often the BIOS of that computer will not support all of the new technologies.
Clearly, one of the conventional ways of upgrading the BIOS programming or image of a computer is to physically replace the Read-Only-Memory (ROM) based BIOS, which in networks systems, would entail replacing the ROM-BIOS in each processor node, which is very time consuming and adds to the overall system down-time of the network.
There have been solutions for updating a BIOS image associated with a processor without having to physically replace the ROM-BIOS at each computer in the network. For example, one solution is to provide the computer with a Flash EPROM for the BIOS, also known as a Flash BIOS. With a Flash BIOS, the BIOS image or a portion of the BIOS image can be updated by a software update. This is often performed by downloading or storing the Flash information onto a media storage device, such as a floppy disk, and using the disk at each computer to flash the BIOS thereof As can be appreciated, this is very time consuming, especially with large network systems. Further, some of the computers on the network may not have floppy drives or the proper medium transfer device.
A second method is to send the flash over the network to each computer in the network. The problem with this method is that the flash is subject to someone introducing malicious code, such as a virus, to the flash, thereby causing the BIOS to be flashed with a corrupt image.